Re: As the fetish implodes

[Doyle Saylor]

Title: Re: [PEN-L:20100] As the fetish implodes

Greetings Economists,
   Timework (aka Tom Walker) writes,

Walker,
I would suggest that phenomena like Nike and Microsoft ALSO elude economic
analysis (in terms of "intellectual property" or monopoly) and cry out for
a critical reading as pathological cultural phenomena -- a neurotic
obsessive-compulsive disorder on a mass scale...

Doyle
First of all, obsessive-compulsive disorder is not something the general public has.  So if one constructs something like a Nike product which is supposed to be taking advantage of obsessive-compulsive disorder the product would fail in a mass market.  Secondly this is anti-disabled since what you are criticizing is obsessive-compulsive disorder as a problem created by a product.

Let me be clear about this part, do disabled people have a right to be part of this society?  Then why does their particular cognitive structure represent a criticism of capitalism?  Most people won't be obsessive-compulsive.  Where that arises in someone if they weren't simply that way all their life, it probably is due to stress reactions due to very great abuse.  Picking out disabled people as the problem in this case then is focusing upon the disabled person as the problem to be fixed.  Get rid of Nike products, fix obsessive-compulsive disorder.  In many cases it is not clear if that is what we want to do even if decent health means one avenue for workers to organize around.  Perhaps having some variation in cognition is what we want to have.  In any case measuring such cognitive ways of being, that is listing symptoms and then applying them to people is very very nebulous about who is obsessive-compulsive and who is not.  The term is simply a medical label, not applicable to people in a way of understanding working class forces in the way it is written above.  Whereas, the way Tom Walker writes about what Nike does would give us no insight whatsoever about how to change the system to prevent creating obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The working class has a very large fraction of disabled members, but the term is holistic when used that way.  The term simply gives us a sense that workers have reality about them, as opposed to an abstract generalization of the whole of human beings that work.  Just as it is important for us to understand women as a component of the working class so it is necessary to understand that disabled people create structure to the working class.  In the above quote, a disability is the problem to be fixed.  The writer fails to understand that in many cases there no reason to single out a kind of behavior as the problem which capitalists forces are responsible for.  In other words if we overthrew capitalism we wouldn't solve obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Having some degree of clarity about not blaming disabled people is part of making the term working class work as a political organizing tool.  We will organize obsessive-compulsive people, and amputees, and blind people, and schizophrenics, and lepers, and old people, etc.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor